One of the weird patterns Francis-hating (and Trump-adoring) conservatism (particularly inside, but also outside the United States) has increasingly manifested over the past several years is the strange habit of turning its accusations into confessions. Again and again, conservatives have accused their enemies of things, only to reveal that they are projecting their own inner desires on to those they hate. So it is no surprise to discover that, in their latest assault on Pope Francis (whom this crowd has… Read more

So the other day, Facebook kicked a bunch of kooks out. Most of them were right wing kooks and one of them was Louis Farrakhan. The President of the United States, eternally ignorant of the Constitution which he swore an oath to protect immediately saw a chance to gin up a Right Wing Panic du Jour and tweeted: I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America —… Read more

So last week, Jimmy Akin offered a typically lucid critique of the absurd letter charging the Holy Father with heresy. It was, I thought, a brave thing to do since the subculture that it was both created by and addressed to is, in large measure, the subculture that reads the National Catholic Register, for whom Jimmy wrote the critique. My fear was that this subculture would lash out at him instead of listening to him. Alas, my fear was not… Read more

He quotes this passage from my recent piece on Prudence and Climate Change: And whenever the Church says things we dislike–be it about unjust war, torture, gun violence, a living wage, the death penalty, birth control, transgenderism, climate change or anything else–we can simply ignore it or dedicate large reserves of our time and energy to fighting the Church. And to rationalize all this, we appeal to “prudential judgment”, which we re-define to mean “those aspects of Church teaching we… Read more

So a few weeks back, I discussed this rather striking moment in my prayer life where God very lovingly told me that I do not love my enemies. I took that to confession and have been thinking a lot about it and trying to change. I’m also working on a book on the Creed and proofing the manuscript. (Books are not written, they are are re-written.) In the course of that, I ran across this thing I wrote a year… Read more

You can read the whole thing here (which is well worth doing since Jimmy’s trademark lucidity is always a pleasure to read), but here’s his summary: Summing Up The Open Letter has many other flaws, but its chief one is that it fails to make the case that the present pope is guilty of heresy. To do that, it would need to show the following: The Magisterium has infallibly defined some specific truth It has infallibly defined that this specific truth is divinely… Read more

Go to the 50 minute mark or so. Well done, Jimmy. This absurd letter is the latest coup attempt by Reactionary crazies. How crazy, you ask? Here’s a guy on Twitter who is keeping tabs on some of the loonier stuff being aired by those hoping for the overthrow of Francis: “It would be good for a secular Italian nationalist and a Protestant empire to force the Pope out at gunpoint and replace him with someone more racist, because I’m… Read more

I thought it would be good to talk a bit about her. Here’s a bit from my upcoming book about the Creed. Skepticism about the Virgin Birth Curiously, the Virgin Birth often seems to provoke more doubt than the Resurrection does. Not just non-Christians, but even many believers have difficulties with it while having no trouble believing Jesus rose from the dead. This doubt can be roughly divided into “weak” and “ardent” skepticism. The weak type of doubt can be… Read more

They write: I’m thinking of actually converting to orthodox. My dad was. I’ve been reading the orthodox way and Frederica Matthews-Green, and feel called, like a vocation. It came down to me walking with two friends, one catholic and one orthodox. We saw a prostitute (not unusual for 14th Street at night). My catholic buddy wanted to cross the street. My ortho pal said we should pray for her. I told another ortho friend I’ve been going to Byz DL…. Read more

These guys never fail to be thoughtful. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges (…) And so it seems certain to… Read more